A yo-yo day

The day started out good with the devotion was about Niagara Falls getting frozen over way back in 1848. (Did you know it was the second largest waterfall in the world? I didn’t know that. I have never seen it but I would like to some day.) Anyway back to the devotion. The water completely stopped even dripping for a couple of hours. A water jam on upper river caused this 20 story tall waterfall to come to a screeching halt. It was an excellent picture of unconfessed sin in our lives. Our sin completely cuts us off or separates from God. His love, grace and forgiveness cannot flow through us because our sin is acting like an ice jam.

We read “The Tales of Fourth Grade Nothing” together again today. We got through two more chapters of Peter’s life. Peter is a nine year old boy with a 3 year old brother. Most of the book is about the little brother and what a handful he is. Jonathan likes the way the book is so humorous.

This is where the yo-yo day began. Because he was upset about his army guys breaking he brought that negative attitude to our school lesson. The geometry lesson today taught more about angles. This time it wanted us to measure the angles. We already knew what acute (less than 90*), right (90*), and obtuse (more than 90*) angles were but they wanted us to be able to know of the 180* on a triangle what angle was point A, B, and C. It had to total 180*. Again, this is hard to explain. JD started our lesson in a bad mood and it transferred into the lesson. We of course were still in the “teaching” part (not the quiz) when he said, “I’m always WRONG!” I had to mention we were being taught at the moment that the quiz was not even started yet. Once he got the first question correct on the quiz I said, “See you got that one right, and the second, and…” (I know we’ve been down this road before and I can only come up with so many ways to let him know he’s smart and still LEARNING!) He got to the quiz and sailed through it. Unfortunately, he sailed so quickly through one question that he forgot to measure and missed that question. I think he thought he could just eyeball it. (**Note to self…the lesson was called “measuring angles” not eyeballing angles.)

JD is doing much better with keyboarding but today I caught him looking at the keyboard. I did get onto him and this made him upset and mad. He tried to get “fresh” with me by not even looking at the words he needed to type on the screen. I got onto him again. Was the lesson fun for him? I don’t know…but by the end he was happy again. (Getting dizzy watching this yo-yo.) Today he relearned “R” and “U.”

I tried to make the journal fun today. And it was a huge hit! The other day I had him write an email to our World Vision sponsor child named Happy. Here it is…Hi, Happy! How are you? Hey, do you know what the word nine means? It means no, in German. How is school over there? I'm in the 5th grade. My school is fun. I am home schooled. How's the weather? Our weather is fine. It is cold here. How's your family? My family is good. How many people live in your house? In my house there are three people and two dogs. How are the crops there? Are they doing good? We go to the grocery store for our food. We haven't planted any crops yet. We plant because we want to or just for fun. Well, see you later. Today before journal time I researched Zambia and got some facts. I wrote a letter to JD like I was Happy. One of the questions in back to JD was “Do you eat your dogs when they get big enough?” (Gross I know, but in many countries they do eat dogs. Sorry it’s a fact of life.) (Happy) told JD he spoke Bemba but was working on English. Happy is currently in the 7th grade and has recently taken his exams so says the real letter he wrote us this month. (Happy) wanted to know if home school meant his house was full of students. (Happy) wanted to know what a grocery store was. They of course plant crops for food. (Happy) attached a map of Africa and asked for a map of where JD lives. JD loved this and happily agreed to write him back making sure to address the dog issue first. Here’s JD’s response. Hey Happy. This is Jonathan from the United States of America (U.S.A.) First thing’s first, I don’t eat my dogs. I play with them because they are fun to play with. Do you have a dog? You should play with it. A grocery store is were we get our food from. It has all the food we would need on shelves. And we buy enough for the week. Home school means I am the only student at my home school. There is one student and one teacher here. My mom is my teacher. I am in the fifth grade. The spring weather gets up to 75* up here and the summer gets up to 100*. I live in the United States, in a state called North Carolina. It’s on the east coast. I hope to hear from you soon, Jonathan. This took a little bit longer than I thought but nothing like the time it takes to create a story from thin air.

The on-line art lesson was working today so I sat in on some of it. It taught him terms like: hue, value, and saturation. (Um, what?) Hue is the colored wheel. Value is whether is gets darker or lighter on a black and white scale. Saturation in the number of squeezes or drops of color you would add to change the color. I love these art lessons. It‘s all in cartoon characters and funny voices. There‘s always things for JD to click on and create in order to learn and practice. The was a small quiz after the lesson and he mastered the lesson.

For the last lesson of the day JD got 14 new words today. Most of them are easy enough words to figure out. Like I have said before JD does not spell phonetically. He just learns words at his own pace. These words were easy enough for him to sound out without any special spelling rules. They were words like draft, grasp, and clamp. During our initial can-you-spell-these-words time he only missed 6 out of 14. Yeah!

He is currently working on his creative book report as homework. He ended up doing a small passport. I went online and found a young marine picture for the picture on the passport. I found passport stamps and have them on all the pages. Each page in the passport book is something different like: title, author, setting, etc. He has until Wednesday to complete this. Funny story though…One of the questions on the inside cover of the passport was “sex.” Meaning of course male or female. JD said, “I don’t think I should say this word.” I said, “What word?” He pointed to it. I said, “Sex?” He hid his face in his bent elbow and mumbled “yeah.” I said, “Is Adam a male or female?” After I knew he was shy about the word sex I whispered “sex” and keep typing my blog. He would slug my arm and sing “mommy!” I said, “Come on and say it. Everybody’s saying it.” (Slug!)